Since I shared my tau starships info, I decided to write up the necron ships as well. I'll probably do up the tyranid ships sometime as well, but for now here is this:

necron ships

sepulchre
Any non-necron ship within 4 VUs of a necron ship with a sepulchre must make a command check every round or lose 1d10 morale. The penalty gets worse by -10 every round. Attack craft pilots must make a command (for squadrons) or willpower (for individuals) check with the same modifiers or lose control of the craft. Torpedoes have a 50% chance of going haywire and destroying themselves.

lightning arc
* strength 1d10+4 damage 4 critical 6 range
These function as macrocannons with a few exceptions. First holofields, shadowfields, and ghost fields (and anything that functions simularly) are completly ineffective against lightning arcs. Second the total strength may be divided between multiple targets, with the restriction of one target per fire arc the lightning arc can fire into. EXAMPLE: a lightning arc that has 10 strength and fires to the fore, port, and starboard fire arcs, could attack a target in the fore with 4 strength, a target in the port side arc with 4 strength, and a target in the starboard fire arc with 2 strength. Any combination withing those restrictions may be used.

Star pulse generator
When the star pulse generator fires it effects every non-necron ship within 4 VUs of the vessel that used it. Holofields, shadow fields, and ghostfields (or any simular device) are completely ineffective against this attack. Each vessel struck is hit for 2d10+5 damage. Armor and shields apply normally.

gauss partical whip
x strength 1d10+4 damage 3 critical 9 range
This weapon functions as a lance. Holofields, shadowfields, and ghostfields (and any simular device) are ineffective. If enough degrees of success are rolled to generate a critical hit, then shields do not apply to the attack.

Portals
acts as a teleportarium with a range of 2 VUs. Each portal allows the ship to make an additional hit and run attack on any ship within range that have had its shields down during that turn.

Reactive hulls
The living metal the ship is made out of reacts to various situations.
The ship ignores all celestial phenomena.
Focused scans do not penetrate the living metal of the ship.
Rather than void shields the reactive hull counters the effects of incoming attacks as best it can, this functions the same as a personal scale force field of the indicated rating, with 0 chance for overload.
If a necron ship convert energy to protective aspects of the hull. When it does this it's ractive hull protection rating increases to 80%. When energy is redirected this way, focused scans can function against the necron ship.
The living metal self repairs and any repair rolls are automaticlly passed once the aloted time has been expended for the roll.

Inertialess drive
non-combat: allows the ship to attain faster than light speeds without entering the warp
combat: whenever adjust speed maneuver is used the ship may decrease or increase its move VU equal to 2 VU per degree of success, and make a single turn for every 4 VU traveled.

Disengaging
Necron ships disengage by phasing out of normal space, to somewhere only necrons know. Chasing a necron ship is not possible.
Necrons always disengage before their ship is un able to.

Morale: Necrons do not suffer morale damage.

THE SHIPS

Cairn class Tombship
battleship
speed 4
reactive armor 50%
turret rating 4
manueverability +10
armor 18
detection +20
hull integrity 150

weapons
lighting arc 30 strength fore/port/starboard

gauss particle whip 6 strength fore/port/starboard

sepulchre
star pulse generator
3 portals
reactive hull
inertialess drive

Scythe class Harvest ship
Cruiser
speed 6
reactive armor 35%
turret rating 3
manueverability +10
armor 18
detection +20
hull integrity 80

weapons
lightning arc 12 strength port/starboard

gauss particle whip 4 strength fore/port/starboard

star pulse generator
2 portals
reactive hull
inertialess drive

Shroud class light crusier
Light cruiser
speed 6
reactive armor 35%
turret rating 1
manueverability +10
armor 18
detection +30
hull integrity 60

weapons
lightning arc strength 15 fore/port/starboard

reactive hull
inertialess drive

special: the shrouds additional stealth systems will never activate automated systems (IE mines)

Jackal class Raider
raider
speed 8
reactive armor 20%
turret rating 1
manueverability +20
armor 18
detection +20
hull integrity 30

weapons
Lightning arc strength 6 fore
1 portal
reactive hull
inertialess drive

Dirge class raider
Raider
speed 10
reactive armor 20%
turret rating 1
manueverability +10
armor 18
detection +20
hull integrity 25

weapons
Lightning arc strength 5 fore

reactive hull
inertialess drive

Hope this is useful to someone out there.

Taking another look at things I would alter the lightning arcs, by dividing them into a separate weapon for every ten strength, but doing the division evenly.

This would put the tombship at 3 lightning arcs of 10 strength each, the scythe would have 2 lightning arcs of 6 strength each, and the shroud would have a 7 strength and an 8 strength lightning arc.

This allows the larger ships to actually hit with their full strength, and it allows them to engage more targets in each arc.

I might also add in barracks to any ship with portals, and maybe the effect of the storm trooper detatchment, both to represent the fact that these ships are crewed by, well, necrons. As far as I am aware, necrons don't exactly have anything less than warriors. (not counting scarabs)

Nice Work Cryhavok, I just read this after last night posting that I was looking for some info on Necron Starships. I was going to use Gauss Heavy Particle Cannons for my starship weapon and I wanted to give them the haywire quality.

I was actually discussing these with a friedn recently and decided, as a house rule, that the necron portals could also be used as the equivalent of launchbays of 1 strength per portal. Teleporting squadrons of the little tiny necron fighters into space to intercept enemy small craft.

I'd suggest dropping the range on the starpulse generator to 2 VU, upping the armour on all ships to 19 and getting rid of the wierd force field rule for the reactive armour. Instead have all necrons ships regenerate a number of hull points per turn dependant on their class - Raiders 1, frigates 2, light cruisers 3, cruisers 4 and battlecruiser and above 5. Then allow for the ship to divert extra power from other systems to up this repair rate by 1 extra hull point per ship system not used, so for example the tomb ship as you described it could pull back from a combat while still using its gauss whip and lightning arcs, but divert the power from the starpulse, sepulchre and 3 portals for a total of 5 extra points repaired that turn. Any turn in which another system is diverted for extra repairs, the ship is succeptable to scanning actions to detect what systems it has on board.

This means that the necrons ships are slightly easier to intially hurt (1 point of extra armour isn't as good as your proposed reactive hull rules) but once damaged they can choose to just repair themselves.

I'd also maybe suggest going with the change of lightning arcs having a strength per arc, and then changing them so that the strength can only be split between targets in the SAME arc. Also only allow the total distance travelled by the lightning to be the max range of the weapon, so as the weapon is range 6 it could hit 1 target at 6, two at 3 or 3 at 2 VU. It makes sense for the necrontyr lightning energy to arc from ship to ship within a certain arc, but not to loop back around the necron ship in a big circle.

Kasatka said:

You are certainly welcome to modify them to your hearts content, but what I posted is as close to the battleflee gothic material as possible. At first glance your proposed system would be much simpler, but also make them vastly weaker ships. The disadvantage they had in BFG was that any hulked necron ship that was captured was worth triple victory points. To put this in perspective, capture a necron capitol ship and pretty much win instantly. They are that high tech and valuable. They should not be mearly the equal of another races ship, but better than anything else it's size. Infact out of all the BFG ships I saw, the only ones more powerful were 1-The Planet Killer, 2-An eldar craftworld, 3-An Ork Warhulk. All of which were much more powerful than any battleship sized ship, of which the tombship is.

A note about the mechanics of your lightning arcs: With your system the necron ships would be much weaker against a single enemy as you are limited to how much strength you can apply as damage to a single ship, by the degrees of success on the attack roll. Making them have a single value would make the capitol ships of the necrons much weaker against a single opponent unless you can get 20+ degrees of success. This is why I had them divided into smaller but more numerous batteries.

As to the lightning arc ranges mechanics you propose: I think you and I are envisioning different things here. You seem to be seeing a single blast that arcs between multiple ships. I am seeing something more akin to the main phaser banks of the enterprise from star trek the next generation, where they system charges up and can them emit multiple beams (or in this case lightning bolts), at different targets, in multiple directions. As what I'm seeing fits the mechanics of the system from BFG, personally I intend on staying true to the lore.

All that being said, your ideas of self repair fit thematically to be similar to the necron ground forces, so if you want to alter from the lore to have it fit more along the lines of what you and your players think it should be, More Power To Ya!

Cryhavok said:

So I thought Necrons use isolated parts of the Webway for travel? Can they travel faster then light besides this?

The latest update makes it so their official preferred method of FTL is the Webway, whereas previous editions stated that they had warp-free FTL involving inertialess drives.

It's possible that they still have intertialess drives, they just prefer the webway because it's so much better, but the fluff suggests (without conclusively stating) that they no longer have them.

This is true. I am, by preference going with the they have both option, as the game I started began before that bit of fluff made it in, many thing that happened would make no sense if I just rewrote history entirely.

I understand that you are trying to port over the necron ship stats from BFG but things have fundamentally changed in the fluff since then and as we've seen with people porting tabletop 40k stats into DH/RT/DW/BC/OW it just doesn't balance out well.

• The descriptions in the BFG book of ships having millions of crew that manually hauled and pushed everything into place were very thematic for the game, but entirely insane and just not practical from a roleplay perspective. As such RT has changed almost all stats about ships other than their classifications (frigate, cruiser etc) and basic weapon loadout (cobras designed for torpedos, mars for hangar decks etc).
• Battery and lance fire operate very differently in RT. As such the dependancy on the old one-two combos to knock down shields then lance crush an enemy are gone. Nowadays its just about massed firepower of any type.
• Strike craft were overused in BFG and woefully underused in RT.
• BFG had two tiers of fleets available - battlefleets (imperium, chaos etc) and raiders (eldar). Raiders vessels were generally faster, with powerful weapons but were either too expensive to field a comparable number to the battlefleets, or were just paper thin and would melt under their fire. RT has done away with this notion and each race has a good list of ships with thematic descriptions for how each one operates.
• BFG contained rules for campaigns but was essentially designed for one off battles. RTs ship combat rules were written from the ground up so that the player characters have a fighting chance to come out winning a lot of the time if they aren't stupid. As such designing ships with tonnes of special rules, even if in character for the ship/race, just leads to player characters either dying or constantly running away.

My suggestions were to lower the range of the Starpulse so that the Necron ships can't just sit back knocking out all strike craft, torpedos, etc without fear of reprisal and to limit the amount of bouncy necron lightning from the arcs so that a single ship cant target and hit everything around it in one turn - the only way i see an RT being able to take on a necron fleet would be to swamp it with a bigger fleet.

To follow the above postone really big difference is the inflated power of escorts compared to capital ships. In BFG, a pair of cruisers could generally devastate a six-strong squadron of escorts with little effort. In RT, the escorts have a real chance of victory against the cruisers.

I also hope that someday FFG will publish something with official stats for necron and tau ships… But I have my doubts that that will happen.

Although it is occuring to me that I am remembering being uncomfortable with the ship speeds as I converted them. Any suggestions for better balance on those speeds and the ones for my tau ships post I would take under consideration for my use.